...You don't need to look further than the President of the United States to see what happens when you start giving people opportunity based on connections and money, rather than on ability and merit: you get spoiled, rich, idiotic brats running the show. You have the system being run by people who have never had to learn from their failures, pay for their mistakes, or succeed on their own merit. And we're going to be paying for that mistake for years to come.....
Aside from being quite a ways off topic, this sentiment is also fucking idiotic.
EVERY presidential candidate who EVER RAN in the US has been "rich and connected", and arguably, protected and spoiled. Every last one of them. If I threw a $10,000-a-plate benefit, would you come?
Maybe these will ring some bells: Monica Lewinsky? Mary Jo Kopechne? Hillary's cattle futures trading? I could go on and on and on, for Dems and Reps as well.
So let's refrain from "throwing rocks" impulsively, there's a lot of windows around here....
~
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My next-door neighbor's pal had one of these cars, roughly 20 years ago. I was too young to drive but I did get to see it up close.
The OUTSIDE of the car looked awesome.
The inside of the car looked rather like it was home-made. Instead of the contoured flush-fitting panels that even cheap cars had back then, it was all square-cut panels. Granted they were covered in fair-quality leather, but the interior did look rather clunky.
And as others have mentioned, the US version had a lower-end engine. The guy told me that it would only go about 120 mph tops, which was surprising because (for what they cost new) I'd thought they were much faster than that.
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Haven't we been hearing a lot of complaints lately that there aren't enough students going into science and engineering?
This brings up an interesting question; does the degree cost have anything to do with the job capacity? In my mind, it doesn't.
At the very time that US companies began offshoring IT work, the US was filled with people with IT degrees and experience. The "lack of qualified workers" seems to mostly been "a lack of masters-degree people who would work for associates-degree salaries".
{....-Now that I think of it, the US university lobby should have been one heavily opposing the B1-B program. US kids are hardly encouraged to go into debt to get a degree knowing that they can always be easily replaced with a less-expensive offshore worker. What was their official position on the matter? Did they even have one?-....}
With some professions it's fairly possible to get into them with a bit of luck and without any college--but for a few like medicine, law and engineering it's pretty-much not easily possible for an average person to do. But one of these jobs is not like the others: doctors and lawyers often need to appear in person to do their jobs; but engineering can be offshored as well.
So who cares if US colleges raise the cost of engineering degrees, or if US students stop taking engineering majors? The same MBA's that offshored IT work are the same ones who will see nothing wrong with offshoring engineering when they find out it's cheaper that way as well. Is it a good idea for US kids to go into debt for school, to try to land a job that may not practically exist within a few years? The only ones losing money on this deal are the colleges.
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The sad fact here is that I didn't expect the Corvette to be any model of efficiency when I picked it.
I went searching for any cars that could do 0-60 in 4 seconds or less, and the Corvette was just the first name on one big list to catch my eye, so I dug up the numbers on it.....There's a lot of existing cars that will do 0-60 in not much more than four seconds, and get fuel efficiency a lot better than a Corvette, and cost a lot less than a Corvette to buy.
What you need to keep in mind with the Tesla is that they are catering to the high-end "novelty" market precisely because they know that they cannot offer anything that can compete on terms of economics at the lower-end of the market.
The problem with electric cars has always been limited range; slow accelleration has never been a problem. There's big differences in the energy-density and compactness of high-quality batteries versus low-quality. Tesla could offer a model with cheaper (lower-quality) batteries and possibly cut their price in half--but that car would have an operating range that was so much lower that nobody interested in buying a $50K car would want it. There's lots of people online who have tried to build their own electric cars, they were free to choose whatever batteries and motors they could afford and the results are pretty consistently disappointing compared to the gasoline engine they took out of the car to make room. The electric cars that the "big car companies" produce are only sold as institutional/facility vehicles--they're not even marketed as general-use vehicles because the practical ranges are so short that the car companies that make them feel it's a waste of time.
I'm all for not polluting the world until everything's dead and battery technology will keep improving, but it's simply not comparable with gasoline engines in terms of overall economics yet. You might do well to ponder "which of these two vehicles uses more resources" if one costs several times what the other does, nevermind which one produces smog.....
At this point I think that if you are one who is REALLY wanting to own an electric vehicle, an electric scooter or motorcycle is the best choice. The reason being that the key to getting good range is using high-energy-density batteries (like li-ions) and good batteries are expensive. Most people can afford to fit out a scooter or motorcycle with such batteries but a car would require several times as much, and is financially out of range of most people.
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Wow, what a deal. All you need to do to drive for one cent per mile is spend $98,000 for a Tesla roadster.
I wonder, how many Teslas have ever been sold, and how many Toyotas were sold.... -last month?....
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Here's a fun comparison:
The Tesla costs $98,000, does zero-60 in 4 seconds, and the battery pack lasts 100,000 miles.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
The EPA mileage is 16/26 city/highway (let's use an average of 20 mpg, in use?)....
And to drive 100,000 miles at 20 mpg will take about 5000 gallons of gas. At $3/gallon, that's $15,000 in fuel costs.
So for $20,000 less, a 2006 Corvette has a faster zero-60 time, a faster top speed, better resale value, and,,,,,, with an 18-gallon tank, it has a range of 360 miles, and can be refueled at any gas station.
I got this idea once a long time ago, though I was not aware it was already being used.
The idea was to make a keyboard that essentially looked like a 7-bar LED display (with a couple odd keys strategically placed) so that to press a "P" for example, you'd press all the bars that would visually make a letter P. I couldn't imagine any way to make touch-typing any easier than that. The planned layout was small enough that with both hands you could cover all the keys.
(-I never built one, but thought it was a nice idea-)
If you only have one input device your fingers might tend to get tied up, but my interest was for a desktop/laptop kepboard, and I planned on having two identical input keyboards, one for left and one for right hands. As long as you pressed any combination of all the necessary buttons for a letter "P" on both keyboards (within some set amount of time), that's what you'd get. Separate buttons would handle shifting and special characters and whatnot.
The reason that regular stenotype chording is hard is because the buttons pressed have no relation to what they represent, one has to remember that.
The reason QUERTY or Dvorak is no help is because a person still has to know where the letter "P" is on the keyboard, and they can't do well at all until they learn that.
Ultimately we should reduce input devices to all the complexity of a pencil; we shouldn't be making children take typing classes in school and they shouldn't need to take them if they already know the alphabet. When all we had was mechanical typewriters it was necessary to learn, but those days are long gone now. The day of practical desktop voice recognition is already here and conventional typing skills have already lost their value in most first-world countries. It's time to start moving away from the conventional keyboard, it's not solving problems anymore.
~
The problem with HFCS in the Unites States is that because of subsidized corn industry, it has proliferated into the ingredients lists of a huge number of processed foods. It's not unreasonable to question what effect that may have.
As for the exercise question, the problem with eating an un-ideal food (or most foods containing an un-ideal additive) is that exercise doesn't escape its effect: if Sweden passed a law that said every meal should contain at least 2 tablespoons of salt in the ingredients, then in ten years, everybody in Sweden's going to have high blood pressure. It won't matter if they started out fat, thin, active or not.
And if anyone there exercises or not isn't going to matter--because while exercise would normally contribute to lowering your blood pressure, if it drives you to burn more calories and consume more over-salted food, then what's the net effect going to be?
~
Almost all personal blog posts are a combination of pointless drivel and endless linkfests.
The zenith of this vapid idiocy is "live blogging", where someone unfamous and unconnected goes somewhere significant (that's usually open to the general public) and does a chatlog play-by-play of everything that happens (not just the significant events).
This I think is only a logical extension of the cell-phone generation, where nobody has to suffer plumbing the depths of their uselessness alone.
As the song goes--lots of people wanna be heard, but they don't got nuthin to say.
~
High-fructose corn syrup has only two problems: ...the first is that compared to cane sugar, it tastes like shit. ...the second is that just about every major study exonerating it of causing any health problems was at least partly funded by the Corn Refiners Ass'n.
(-I was kinda hoping corn/ethanol would take off and we'd get real sugar again in US food, but I see it's not to be, at least anytime soon-)
I'll still drink a bit when I'm out, but I'm not taking any more soda home.
I have decided that if I want a bit of sugar hit, I'd be better off taking a teaspoon full of organic cane sugar with a glass of water.
I don't get the flavor of soda that way, but then really, I wasn't getting the flavor of soda anyway.
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Well of course!
After all, they wouldn't open a center in Canada just to focus on hiring non-Canadians, would they?..... ,,,
Ummm,,,,,,,
-does Canada have anything like the US's B-1B guest worker program?....
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There's an old joke that goes something like this:
A Mexican and a Cowboy are drinking in a bar right on the border. The cowboy says "Why are you Mexican people always so mad at us? What'd we wever do to you?"
The Mexican turns to him and says "You stole half our country! And worse than that, you took the half with all the paved roads!"
Then the cowboy says "Yea but when we took that land, nobody lived there, and the roads weren't paved."
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First off.... the US does not at all need illegal immigrants, particularly those from central and S. American countries.
These people tend to leave their own countries because of lousy economic conditions--but it never seems to sink in that the governments in those countries plays a big part in the lousy economic conditions. Mexico's gov't has a few people who seem to be earnestly trying to do the decent thing, but fact is most of it sucks for corruption, and has for a long time. The Mexican electorate can't seem to figure out how NOT to vote brutes and grifters into office....So many "hard-working people" take the easy way out, and come illegally into the US, and send money home. To the country they don't want to live in, because of the government THEY elected and leave in power. Are these the people we want in the US? Are these people we want to extend citizenship to? What sorts of people do you think they'll elect to office, given the chance?.... If "Aztlan Pride" means being a cowering hypocrite, let them wave their flags in the civic cesspools they have made for themselves.
Mexican people are not dumb, and are not lazy. Mexico has decent amounts of natural resources, industry (other than the border maquiladoras) and educational institutions. There is nothing wrong with the country except for the people who tend to get elected to run it--and Mexicans need to stay home and figure out how to fix that themselves.
Second of all--the reason that immigrants come to the US is that they know they can get jobs, and the reason for that is that the agricultural business lobby has always tried to minimize the EMPLOYER's penalties for hiring illegals. The key to not attracting so many illegals is not to try to fine the illegals, they wired all their extra money home. The key here is making the BUSINESSES caught employing them pay--dearly. Like, say,,, $1000 per day of known employment. When the farm lobby sees that it's cheaper to hire legal citizens, they'll raise wages and probably be able to hire legals. They won't LIKE that, because those legals will have full job rights under US law--something that illegals do not have now. But if McDonald's and Wal-Mart knew they could get away with hiring near-100% illegals and pay them $3 an hour, do you think they'd do it too? And do you think they'd be happy to see an end put to it?
US companies that hire illegals need to pay through the nose, and that money needs to be spent on deporting the illegals caught. It's for their own good. (while we're at it, we need to rescind "birthright citizenship". All the blacks who were slaves are already citizens now, and that was the entire point of the law)
Thirdly--Whatever Mexico thinks of US immigrant policy is meaningless; the trite US police abuse that Mexico calls "an outrage" is mild compared to what Mexican police do regularly to people entering their own country illegally at the southern border.
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What the fuck is the idiot fetish with "city cars that are easy to park"???....
Last time I checked, the problems that existing electric vehicles had was that they were small and cramped and that the batteries were too expensive and didn't offer enough range. Not once have I ever heard anyone say they weren't driving an electric car instead of an internal-conbustion because it was "too hard to park the electric in the city"...
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The Yugo was supposed to be a small, cheap car too. Not particularly fuel-efficient outside of having a small engine, but anyway...
The original "base price" advertised was something like $5,999 - but as I remember, the lowest-priced models you could get for a long time approached $9K. Dealers tended to load them up with extra features. It wasn't until they had been selling for a couple years that you could actually get a base model at base price--and by then, most people had heard the stories of shoddy construction and poor reliability, and were no longer interested.
At $14K and 40 mpg, the smart car's only advantage would seem to be being easy to park. I'd be willing to bet that the price would hit somewhere near $20K, and the fuel economy isn't particularly great.
I wish Mercedes the best of luck, but I suspect we'll be seeing another ego-driven product like the current hybrids--where a person spends $35K on a new car instead of $25K, so that they can get 50 mpg instead of 40 mpg and smugly claim to give a shit about the environment.
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I encode my MP3's (mostly rock/pop) and try to download stuff at 192 because the cymbals sound warbly at 128, even with lower-end speakers....
If you read some of the older tube-audio engineering books from the WW-II era {the Radio Designer's Handbook by Terman and the Radiotron book for two} in the chapters on sound reproduction, they go into how circuits of the era were designed and tested--usually not by simply revealing technical specs of the circuit's performance (that most people wouldn't have understood anyway) but by simple listening tests at large public functions like World's Fairs and so on. The radio makers wanted to use the simplest, cheapest circuits they could--but to sell they had to sound nice.
What's interesting is that the amplifier circuits that were most-preferred were often not the most technically accurate or complex, and the sound source didn't even have to cover the full-range of human hearing, or even the full-range of radio transmission at the time. People were generally very sensitive to some ranges of frequencies and far less so to others.
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This result (what I can glean from comments, as the site is being pounded) doesn't surprise me.
I have an aging Win98-era Pentium II@350 Mhz with 392 megs of RAM, and running Win98, it simply flies.... I keep it around to run some era programs I like, and every time I power it up, I am simply stunned all over again at how blazingly fast it responds. It responds to user input and opens regular programs noticeably faster than the few computers I've bought since--computers that have faster drives, much faster CPU's and way more RAM..... I have (single-CPU) WinXP machines (haven't stepped up to any dual-cores yet, but I wonder what good it'll do), have run a couple GUI-distros of Linux on them over the years and have seen Apples at work--and nothing new I've yet seen is as fast as that clunker 98 box is, running 98.:|
Of course Win98 has a number of problems now--a lot of vulnerabilities and no antivirus I know of still supports it, so getting online is walking in a minefield. And even used for local apps it needs to be rebooted every 4-6 hours to be safe... but even then, warm-rebooting only takes like 20 fucking seconds, and that's just the usual OS install, no optimization ever undertaken. Did we used to bitch about bootup times? Have they gotten longer or shorter?
For a whlie I had Mandrake on it too, but Mandrake ran like a dog. With Linux and WinXP there's all this fucking-about with the hard drive that has to occur, for some reason..... any time you do something, even with the hard drives spinning, these bigger/better OS's seemto have to go off and piss away a couple seconds before actually doing anything.
Way back in another Optimus thread I posted that the cheapest these OLED displays could probably be had for was $5-$7 per key, and that I'd be amazed if they could make them for less than $700 (-retail for a key-sized OLED would have been somewhere around $15 each at that time).
There's $30 cell phones with color OLEDs at Wal-Mart now, so maybe there's been some downward shifting on OLED prices, but certainly not a 50% shift.
So the price is not right, but was I closest?
What do I win, Johhny?
~
...I can do 30-40 miles on my first 1.5 liters of water +.5 liters of gatoraid. That works out to 57-76 mpg....
Yes but you see--Gatorade costs more than gasoline (at least today, anyway).
A motorized bicycle with a 25cc 4-cycle engine would get around 200 to 225 or so MPG.
A half-liter of Gatorade costs what, $1.30? At the moment (on the US Gas Temperature Map) most of the US is between about $3.05 and $3.31/gal... so $1.30 would buy about 40% of a gallon of regular.
That should get you at least around 80 miles on the motorized bike, and the motorized bike will be cruising at 25+ MPH. If you held it down to 18-20 MPH (a typical bicycle speed) the MPG of the motor-bicycle would be even somewhat higher....
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...Also I just got my $3000+ tax refund check - thanks to my prius...
Here's a fun question:
If hybrid cars are so much more fuel-efficient than regular cars, then why does the government need to pay you $3000 to buy one?
Presumably a car that's more fuel-efficient would cost less to operate, right?
I'm generally for polluting less and less foreign oil dependency and all, but I tend to wonder--why did some (-okay, a couple-) states think they had to hide the true cost of ownership?...
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...It's about damn time the EPA revised their ridiculously inaccurate tests. The data has been off for years, for all cars.
As I read it--the EPA tests were never intended to indicate the exact mileage you would get with any car. Their only purpose was to apply a standard test across all cars available, so that buyers could make informed choices about their relative fuel efficiencies.
Once the tests were in place, the EPA was loathe to change them for fear of breaking the standardization.
It was not until hybrids came along that they decided to, and only because hybrids were staying on their batteries too much during the tests (the hybrids tended to drain their batteries at rates that were higher than the recharge rates, so therefore the EPA people concluded that the test was not indicating the hybrids' true overall efficiencies).
-------
What I'm wondering is--what speed did the EPA test highway MPG at during the "national-55-mph limit" years? The first cars on it were during the 70-MPH era.... I think...? And now of course many states have gone back up to 70-MPH....
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I tend to wonder if this has more to do with women having higher employment standards than men do--I know in my current employer, it's consistently more difficult to find women willing to work night shifts than it is men.
And FWIW, I got an assoc and had a couple calls for a networking tech positions.... part-time hours, and on call at times--like evenings and weekends.
Ummm,,,,,, no thanks.
Stuck trying to live off an $8/hr job with no way to even well consider a second job? Nope, forget it.
I never did get a tech job. It was kinda a bummer at the time, but nowadays I don't worry about it that much.
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Vista Home Basic includes the "core experience," which means Microsoft admits that the rest is useless window dressing.
Hey... which version comes without the DRM feature?
Well,,,,,, none of them!
The new DRM and security vulnerabilities are the core experience!
(-the lack of backwards software and hardware compatability is just a new thing they're trying out, something to help out all the peripheral manufacturers too-).
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Any of you young'uns old enough to remember the movie Looker? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/ ....
Hmmmm,,,
Holy shit! They're two for two-- CGI media models, and now this. Maybe I better go back and watch that movie again....
~
(-by the by, I'd still like to find the soundtrack to this movie, if anyone has run across a copy-)
Since when does manufacturing cost/cost over life equal friendly to the environment?
-Because (generally speaking) the cost of an item is essentially a measure of the resources that went into it, and whenever resources get used, that usually results in pollution.
(The question I have now is this: if an electric engine has a higher cost-per-mile than a gasoline engine does, then how can you improve the overall efficinency of a gasoline engine by adding a [less-efficient] electric motor onto it?...)
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The "cost=pollution" theorem is generally accurate, but course the question of pollution itself (particularly which types of pollution impact the environment more or less than which other types) is much more complicated. Simpletons tend to insist that anything electric must be a better choice than any internal-combustion engine, just because internal-combustion engines have exhaust pipes, and, you know, like, "icky stuff" comes out of them--but that's rather short-sighted; smog isn't the only type of pollution, nor is it even the most dangerous.
To compare the "ecological benefit" of electric vehicles (or even of combination-engine vehicles) it's easy to imagine 'no smog', but most people have difficulties conceiving the ecological damage of every car needing a new 1000-1500 lb battery every couple of years, and the disposal (or recycling) that such a massive industrial undertaking would cause--that we currently don't have at all yet. If you think batteries are friendly to the environnment, pick one (any one), crack it open and spread the contents on your vegetable garden and see how your salad tastes next week.
...Certainly batteries can be recycled, for that matter everything could be recycled, but for most materials it doesn't make economic sense and only results in using more energy and resources (and creating more pollution!) than just dumping them in a hole in the ground would.
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Also We Note: I became suspicious of hybrids early on, at least as they were marketed in the USA.
Why did California feel the need to offer rebates for purchasing them?
If hybrids really did last just as long and work just as well and get much better mileage, the government shouldn't have needed to pay anyone tax dollars to buy the things. I'm generally supportive of causing less pollution, but when the government thinks they have to hand out money to people in order to get them to buy a car that's supposed to be more economical than the cars they are currently driving, my bullshit alarm starts buzzing. I would bet that history will show that the cost per mile of hybrids will end up being WAY higher than for conventional petroleum-engine vehicles, and that this was simply a ham-fisted attempt to conceal that fact.
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Slashdot Mirror
EVERY presidential candidate who EVER RAN in the US has been "rich and connected", and arguably, protected and spoiled. Every last one of them. If I threw a $10,000-a-plate benefit, would you come?
Maybe these will ring some bells: Monica Lewinsky? Mary Jo Kopechne? Hillary's cattle futures trading? I could go on and on and on, for Dems and Reps as well.
So let's refrain from "throwing rocks" impulsively, there's a lot of windows around here....
~ ~
My next-door neighbor's pal had one of these cars, roughly 20 years ago. I was too young to drive but I did get to see it up close.
The OUTSIDE of the car looked awesome.
The inside of the car looked rather like it was home-made. Instead of the contoured flush-fitting panels that even cheap cars had back then, it was all square-cut panels. Granted they were covered in fair-quality leather, but the interior did look rather clunky.
And as others have mentioned, the US version had a lower-end engine. The guy told me that it would only go about 120 mph tops, which was surprising because (for what they cost new) I'd thought they were much faster than that.
~
At the very time that US companies began offshoring IT work, the US was filled with people with IT degrees and experience. The "lack of qualified workers" seems to mostly been "a lack of masters-degree people who would work for associates-degree salaries".
{....-Now that I think of it, the US university lobby should have been one heavily opposing the B1-B program. US kids are hardly encouraged to go into debt to get a degree knowing that they can always be easily replaced with a less-expensive offshore worker. What was their official position on the matter? Did they even have one?-....}
With some professions it's fairly possible to get into them with a bit of luck and without any college--but for a few like medicine, law and engineering it's pretty-much not easily possible for an average person to do. But one of these jobs is not like the others: doctors and lawyers often need to appear in person to do their jobs; but engineering can be offshored as well.
So who cares if US colleges raise the cost of engineering degrees, or if US students stop taking engineering majors? The same MBA's that offshored IT work are the same ones who will see nothing wrong with offshoring engineering when they find out it's cheaper that way as well. Is it a good idea for US kids to go into debt for school, to try to land a job that may not practically exist within a few years? The only ones losing money on this deal are the colleges.
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The sad fact here is that I didn't expect the Corvette to be any model of efficiency when I picked it. ....There's a lot of existing cars that will do 0-60 in not much more than four seconds, and get fuel efficiency a lot better than a Corvette, and cost a lot less than a Corvette to buy.
I went searching for any cars that could do 0-60 in 4 seconds or less, and the Corvette was just the first name on one big list to catch my eye, so I dug up the numbers on it.
What you need to keep in mind with the Tesla is that they are catering to the high-end "novelty" market precisely because they know that they cannot offer anything that can compete on terms of economics at the lower-end of the market.
The problem with electric cars has always been limited range; slow accelleration has never been a problem. There's big differences in the energy-density and compactness of high-quality batteries versus low-quality. Tesla could offer a model with cheaper (lower-quality) batteries and possibly cut their price in half--but that car would have an operating range that was so much lower that nobody interested in buying a $50K car would want it. There's lots of people online who have tried to build their own electric cars, they were free to choose whatever batteries and motors they could afford and the results are pretty consistently disappointing compared to the gasoline engine they took out of the car to make room. The electric cars that the "big car companies" produce are only sold as institutional/facility vehicles--they're not even marketed as general-use vehicles because the practical ranges are so short that the car companies that make them feel it's a waste of time.
I'm all for not polluting the world until everything's dead and battery technology will keep improving, but it's simply not comparable with gasoline engines in terms of overall economics yet. You might do well to ponder "which of these two vehicles uses more resources" if one costs several times what the other does, nevermind which one produces smog.....
At this point I think that if you are one who is REALLY wanting to own an electric vehicle, an electric scooter or motorcycle is the best choice. The reason being that the key to getting good range is using high-energy-density batteries (like li-ions) and good batteries are expensive. Most people can afford to fit out a scooter or motorcycle with such batteries but a car would require several times as much, and is financially out of range of most people.
~
Wow, what a deal. All you need to do to drive for one cent per mile is spend $98,000 for a Tesla roadster.
I wonder, how many Teslas have ever been sold, and how many Toyotas were sold.... -last month?....
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Here's a fun comparison:
The Tesla costs $98,000, does zero-60 in 4 seconds, and the battery pack lasts 100,000 miles.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
The EPA mileage is 16/26 city/highway (let's use an average of 20 mpg, in use?)....
And to drive 100,000 miles at 20 mpg will take about 5000 gallons of gas. At $3/gallon, that's $15,000 in fuel costs.
So for $20,000 less, a 2006 Corvette has a faster zero-60 time, a faster top speed, better resale value, and,,,,,, with an 18-gallon tank, it has a range of 360 miles, and can be refueled at any gas station.
Hmmmm,,,,, decisions, decisions.....
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I got this idea once a long time ago, though I was not aware it was already being used.
The idea was to make a keyboard that essentially looked like a 7-bar LED display (with a couple odd keys strategically placed) so that to press a "P" for example, you'd press all the bars that would visually make a letter P. I couldn't imagine any way to make touch-typing any easier than that. The planned layout was small enough that with both hands you could cover all the keys.
(-I never built one, but thought it was a nice idea-)
If you only have one input device your fingers might tend to get tied up, but my interest was for a desktop/laptop kepboard, and I planned on having two identical input keyboards, one for left and one for right hands. As long as you pressed any combination of all the necessary buttons for a letter "P" on both keyboards (within some set amount of time), that's what you'd get. Separate buttons would handle shifting and special characters and whatnot.
The reason that regular stenotype chording is hard is because the buttons pressed have no relation to what they represent, one has to remember that.
The reason QUERTY or Dvorak is no help is because a person still has to know where the letter "P" is on the keyboard, and they can't do well at all until they learn that.
Ultimately we should reduce input devices to all the complexity of a pencil; we shouldn't be making children take typing classes in school and they shouldn't need to take them if they already know the alphabet. When all we had was mechanical typewriters it was necessary to learn, but those days are long gone now. The day of practical desktop voice recognition is already here and conventional typing skills have already lost their value in most first-world countries.
It's time to start moving away from the conventional keyboard, it's not solving problems anymore.
~
The problem with HFCS in the Unites States is that because of subsidized corn industry, it has proliferated into the ingredients lists of a huge number of processed foods. It's not unreasonable to question what effect that may have.
As for the exercise question, the problem with eating an un-ideal food (or most foods containing an un-ideal additive) is that exercise doesn't escape its effect: if Sweden passed a law that said every meal should contain at least 2 tablespoons of salt in the ingredients, then in ten years, everybody in Sweden's going to have high blood pressure. It won't matter if they started out fat, thin, active or not.
And if anyone there exercises or not isn't going to matter--because while exercise would normally contribute to lowering your blood pressure, if it drives you to burn more calories and consume more over-salted food, then what's the net effect going to be?
~
Almost all personal blog posts are a combination of pointless drivel and endless linkfests.
The zenith of this vapid idiocy is "live blogging", where someone unfamous and unconnected goes somewhere significant (that's usually open to the general public) and does a chatlog play-by-play of everything that happens (not just the significant events).
This I think is only a logical extension of the cell-phone generation, where nobody has to suffer plumbing the depths of their uselessness alone.
As the song goes--lots of people wanna be heard, but they don't got nuthin to say.
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High-fructose corn syrup has only two problems:
...the first is that compared to cane sugar, it tastes like shit.
...the second is that just about every major study exonerating it of causing any health problems was at least partly funded by the Corn Refiners Ass'n.
(-I was kinda hoping corn/ethanol would take off and we'd get real sugar again in US food, but I see it's not to be, at least anytime soon-)
I'll still drink a bit when I'm out, but I'm not taking any more soda home.
I have decided that if I want a bit of sugar hit, I'd be better off taking a teaspoon full of organic cane sugar with a glass of water.
I don't get the flavor of soda that way, but then really, I wasn't getting the flavor of soda anyway.
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Well of course!
,,,
After all, they wouldn't open a center in Canada just to focus on hiring non-Canadians, would they?.....
Ummm,,,,,,,
-does Canada have anything like the US's B-1B guest worker program?....
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There's an old joke that goes something like this:
...So many "hard-working people" take the easy way out, and come illegally into the US, and send money home. To the country they don't want to live in, because of the government THEY elected and leave in power. Are these the people we want in the US? Are these people we want to extend citizenship to? What sorts of people do you think they'll elect to office, given the chance?.... If "Aztlan Pride" means being a cowering hypocrite, let them wave their flags in the civic cesspools they have made for themselves.
A Mexican and a Cowboy are drinking in a bar right on the border. The cowboy says "Why are you Mexican people always so mad at us? What'd we wever do to you?"
The Mexican turns to him and says "You stole half our country! And worse than that, you took the half with all the paved roads!"
Then the cowboy says "Yea but when we took that land, nobody lived there, and the roads weren't paved."
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First off.... the US does not at all need illegal immigrants, particularly those from central and S. American countries.
These people tend to leave their own countries because of lousy economic conditions--but it never seems to sink in that the governments in those countries plays a big part in the lousy economic conditions. Mexico's gov't has a few people who seem to be earnestly trying to do the decent thing, but fact is most of it sucks for corruption, and has for a long time. The Mexican electorate can't seem to figure out how NOT to vote brutes and grifters into office.
Mexican people are not dumb, and are not lazy. Mexico has decent amounts of natural resources, industry (other than the border maquiladoras) and educational institutions. There is nothing wrong with the country except for the people who tend to get elected to run it--and Mexicans need to stay home and figure out how to fix that themselves.
Second of all--the reason that immigrants come to the US is that they know they can get jobs, and the reason for that is that the agricultural business lobby has always tried to minimize the EMPLOYER's penalties for hiring illegals. The key to not attracting so many illegals is not to try to fine the illegals, they wired all their extra money home. The key here is making the BUSINESSES caught employing them pay--dearly. Like, say,,, $1000 per day of known employment. When the farm lobby sees that it's cheaper to hire legal citizens, they'll raise wages and probably be able to hire legals. They won't LIKE that, because those legals will have full job rights under US law--something that illegals do not have now. But if McDonald's and Wal-Mart knew they could get away with hiring near-100% illegals and pay them $3 an hour, do you think they'd do it too? And do you think they'd be happy to see an end put to it?
US companies that hire illegals need to pay through the nose, and that money needs to be spent on deporting the illegals caught. It's for their own good. (while we're at it, we need to rescind "birthright citizenship". All the blacks who were slaves are already citizens now, and that was the entire point of the law)
Thirdly--Whatever Mexico thinks of US immigrant policy is meaningless; the trite US police abuse that Mexico calls "an outrage" is mild compared to what Mexican police do regularly to people entering their own country illegally at the southern border.
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What the fuck is the idiot fetish with "city cars that are easy to park"???....
Last time I checked, the problems that existing electric vehicles had was that they were small and cramped and that the batteries were too expensive and didn't offer enough range. Not once have I ever heard anyone say they weren't driving an electric car instead of an internal-conbustion because it was "too hard to park the electric in the city"...
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The Yugo was supposed to be a small, cheap car too. Not particularly fuel-efficient outside of having a small engine, but anyway...
The original "base price" advertised was something like $5,999 - but as I remember, the lowest-priced models you could get for a long time approached $9K. Dealers tended to load them up with extra features. It wasn't until they had been selling for a couple years that you could actually get a base model at base price--and by then, most people had heard the stories of shoddy construction and poor reliability, and were no longer interested.
At $14K and 40 mpg, the smart car's only advantage would seem to be being easy to park. I'd be willing to bet that the price would hit somewhere near $20K, and the fuel economy isn't particularly great.
I wish Mercedes the best of luck, but I suspect we'll be seeing another ego-driven product like the current hybrids--where a person spends $35K on a new car instead of $25K, so that they can get 50 mpg instead of 40 mpg and smugly claim to give a shit about the environment.
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I encode my MP3's (mostly rock/pop) and try to download stuff at 192 because the cymbals sound warbly at 128, even with lower-end speakers....
If you read some of the older tube-audio engineering books from the WW-II era {the Radio Designer's Handbook by Terman and the Radiotron book for two} in the chapters on sound reproduction, they go into how circuits of the era were designed and tested--usually not by simply revealing technical specs of the circuit's performance (that most people wouldn't have understood anyway) but by simple listening tests at large public functions like World's Fairs and so on. The radio makers wanted to use the simplest, cheapest circuits they could--but to sell they had to sound nice.
What's interesting is that the amplifier circuits that were most-preferred were often not the most technically accurate or complex, and the sound source didn't even have to cover the full-range of human hearing, or even the full-range of radio transmission at the time. People were generally very sensitive to some ranges of frequencies and far less so to others.
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This result (what I can glean from comments, as the site is being pounded) doesn't surprise me.
.... I have (single-CPU) WinXP machines (haven't stepped up to any dual-cores yet, but I wonder what good it'll do), have run a couple GUI-distros of Linux on them over the years and have seen Apples at work--and nothing new I've yet seen is as fast as that clunker 98 box is, running 98. :|
I have an aging Win98-era Pentium II@350 Mhz with 392 megs of RAM, and running Win98, it simply flies.... I keep it around to run some era programs I like, and every time I power it up, I am simply stunned all over again at how blazingly fast it responds. It responds to user input and opens regular programs noticeably faster than the few computers I've bought since--computers that have faster drives, much faster CPU's and way more RAM.
Of course Win98 has a number of problems now--a lot of vulnerabilities and no antivirus I know of still supports it, so getting online is walking in a minefield. And even used for local apps it needs to be rebooted every 4-6 hours to be safe... but even then, warm-rebooting only takes like 20 fucking seconds, and that's just the usual OS install, no optimization ever undertaken. Did we used to bitch about bootup times? Have they gotten longer or shorter?
For a whlie I had Mandrake on it too, but Mandrake ran like a dog. With Linux and WinXP there's all this fucking-about with the hard drive that has to occur, for some reason..... any time you do something, even with the hard drives spinning, these bigger/better OS's seemto have to go off and piss away a couple seconds before actually doing anything.
All your boxen belong to bloat.
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...but I was kinda off, I suppose....
Way back in another Optimus thread I posted that the cheapest these OLED displays could probably be had for was $5-$7 per key, and that I'd be amazed if they could make them for less than $700 (-retail for a key-sized OLED would have been somewhere around $15 each at that time).
There's $30 cell phones with color OLEDs at Wal-Mart now, so maybe there's been some downward shifting on OLED prices, but certainly not a 50% shift.
So the price is not right, but was I closest?
What do I win, Johhny?
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Yes but you see--Gatorade costs more than gasoline (at least today, anyway).
A motorized bicycle with a 25cc 4-cycle engine would get around 200 to 225 or so MPG.
A half-liter of Gatorade costs what, $1.30? At the moment (on the US Gas Temperature Map) most of the US is between about $3.05 and $3.31/gal... so $1.30 would buy about 40% of a gallon of regular.
That should get you at least around 80 miles on the motorized bike, and the motorized bike will be cruising at 25+ MPH. If you held it down to 18-20 MPH (a typical bicycle speed) the MPG of the motor-bicycle would be even somewhat higher....
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Here's a fun question:
If hybrid cars are so much more fuel-efficient than regular cars, then why does the government need to pay you $3000 to buy one?
Presumably a car that's more fuel-efficient would cost less to operate, right?
I'm generally for polluting less and less foreign oil dependency and all, but I tend to wonder--why did some (-okay, a couple-) states think they had to hide the true cost of ownership?...
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Once the tests were in place, the EPA was loathe to change them for fear of breaking the standardization.
It was not until hybrids came along that they decided to, and only because hybrids were staying on their batteries too much during the tests (the hybrids tended to drain their batteries at rates that were higher than the recharge rates, so therefore the EPA people concluded that the test was not indicating the hybrids' true overall efficiencies).
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What I'm wondering is--what speed did the EPA test highway MPG at during the "national-55-mph limit" years? The first cars on it were during the 70-MPH era.... I think...? And now of course many states have gone back up to 70-MPH.... ~
I tend to wonder if this has more to do with women having higher employment standards than men do--I know in my current employer, it's consistently more difficult to find women willing to work night shifts than it is men.
And FWIW, I got an assoc and had a couple calls for a networking tech positions.... part-time hours, and on call at times--like evenings and weekends.
Ummm,,,,,, no thanks.
Stuck trying to live off an $8/hr job with no way to even well consider a second job? Nope, forget it.
I never did get a tech job. It was kinda a bummer at the time, but nowadays I don't worry about it that much.
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Well there IS pdf's, if you wanna be that picky......
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This was the first thing I thought of as well..... good job so far and all, but really. ~
The new DRM and security vulnerabilities are the core experience!
(-the lack of backwards software and hardware compatability is just a new thing they're trying out, something to help out all the peripheral manufacturers too-).
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Any of you young'uns old enough to remember the movie Looker?
....
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/
Hmmmm,,,
Holy shit! They're two for two-- CGI media models, and now this. Maybe I better go back and watch that movie again....
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(-by the by, I'd still like to find the soundtrack to this movie, if anyone has run across a copy-)
I don't know squat about Hummers or Priusi (?) but I did investigate some figures comparing gasoline to electric bicycle engines.
I found that the 4-cycle gasoline engines were quite a bit more economical over their lifetimes than the comparable electric setups were:
http://www.norcom2000.com/users/dcimper/assorted/
(The question I have now is this: if an electric engine has a higher cost-per-mile than a gasoline engine does, then how can you improve the overall efficinency of a gasoline engine by adding a [less-efficient] electric motor onto it?...)
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The "cost=pollution" theorem is generally accurate, but course the question of pollution itself (particularly which types of pollution impact the environment more or less than which other types) is much more complicated. Simpletons tend to insist that anything electric must be a better choice than any internal-combustion engine, just because internal-combustion engines have exhaust pipes, and, you know, like, "icky stuff" comes out of them--but that's rather short-sighted; smog isn't the only type of pollution, nor is it even the most dangerous.
To compare the "ecological benefit" of electric vehicles (or even of combination-engine vehicles) it's easy to imagine 'no smog', but most people have difficulties conceiving the ecological damage of every car needing a new 1000-1500 lb battery every couple of years, and the disposal (or recycling) that such a massive industrial undertaking would cause--that we currently don't have at all yet. If you think batteries are friendly to the environnment, pick one (any one), crack it open and spread the contents on your vegetable garden and see how your salad tastes next week.
...Certainly batteries can be recycled, for that matter everything could be recycled, but for most materials it doesn't make economic sense and only results in using more energy and resources (and creating more pollution!) than just dumping them in a hole in the ground would.
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Also We Note: I became suspicious of hybrids early on, at least as they were marketed in the USA.
Why did California feel the need to offer rebates for purchasing them?
If hybrids really did last just as long and work just as well and get much better mileage, the government shouldn't have needed to pay anyone tax dollars to buy the things. I'm generally supportive of causing less pollution, but when the government thinks they have to hand out money to people in order to get them to buy a car that's supposed to be more economical than the cars they are currently driving, my bullshit alarm starts buzzing. I would bet that history will show that the cost per mile of hybrids will end up being WAY higher than for conventional petroleum-engine vehicles, and that this was simply a ham-fisted attempt to conceal that fact.
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